qt, gtk, wx for py3 ?

[Paul Boddie]

On 4 Mar, 00:40, Peter Billam <pe... at www.pjb.com.au> wrote:
>
> Thanks for that.  I also checked out:
>  http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/WxWidgets_Compared_To_Other_Toolkits
> which seemed surprisingly even-handed.

I don't have a horse in this race, but apart from needing to update
that page based on recent developments (at least for Qt: a licensing
change which, being someone in favour of Free Software, I'm not
particularly enthusiastic about), I see that there's the usual fluff
about "native widgets" as usual. PyQt still has the GPL/commercial
licensing scheme, but I don't think anyone needs to apologise for that
- I'm a Free Software advocate, as I wrote, so I feel that if you're
in the business of writing proprietary software for sale but expect
your tools for free, typically because of the margins (although people
usually don't admit to it in that way), then you're either not
charging enough or you're not writing stuff people want.

> On 2009-03-03, Mike Driscoll <kyoso... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It should be noted that the port for 3.0 hasn't started yet for
> > wxPython and I'm not seeing anything about a port for PyQt either
> > on their website.
>
> I couldn't see them either, so I'm glad to hear I wasn't hallucinating.

Take a look at this thread:

http://www.mail-archive.com/pyqt@riverbankcomputing.com/msg15072.html

> Nobody mentioned gtk yet, perhaps because its "primary development
> and focus is for Unix, with multi-platform development mostly as an
> afterthought."

Regardless of the apparent priorities of the Gtk+ developers, I think
it's better to take advice from sources other than just the developers
of one of the competing solutions:

http://www.gtk.org/features.html

Sure, the Mac OS X port is relatively new, if the one shown is
actually the "native" one and not the X11 one.

> Qt4 for windows is GPL, though its direct access to /dev/fb in linux
> (potentially important) is commercial and royalty dependent.

Well, there's an "open source" download for the embedded version of
Qt, but I don't know if the framebuffer stuff is included:

http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/platform/qt-for-embedded-linux/

>From what the Openmoko community have been doing, I would imagine that
the GPL version of Qtopia (or Qt Extended, or whatever) did have
framebuffer support, mostly because the Openmoko community then did
weird stuff to change Qtopia to use Qt/X11.

> > When I started out with Tkinter, I didn't find the docs to be any
> > better than what I found in wxPython. Each toolkit has it's own ups
> > and downs. I would recommend trying them until you find something you
> > like.
>
> I think that's what I'm embarked on...  But I'm coming to Python at
> the 3.0.1 version (from a perl5 background, as an alternative to
> perl6 which I'll evaluate when it's available) so I'm hanging out
> for those Py3 versions...

Although I've been quite negative about Python 3's backwards
compatibility and its apparent benefits when compared to Python 2, I
don't think it's sensible to hang around waiting for Python 3 library
availability. You'd be better served using Python 2 straight away and
then considering moving to Python 3 when such libraries finally become
available.

Paul